SOCIAL PROFILE
joannagilmanhyde must be a Throwback to The Fifties:
White Stay-At-Home Mom
Wife to A Silver Haired Doctor
Moderate Drinker — Would Like To Smoke
NOT A CHURCH GOER
Eats Red Meat & Lots Of It
Likes To Shop but Considers Cost
Doesn’t Care (very much) What She Drives
As Long As It Works
Has Been Seen Eating @ MacDonalds
In An Off-The-Shoulder Oprah Evening Dress
*Please come back and read this post from time to time. Like the “Self Organizing Galaxy” itself, this post is still evolving…
MY WORLD TRADE CENTRE PHOTO
the early stages of Self Organizing Galaxy 1984 – by Joanna Hyde
MY WORLD TRADE CENTER PHOTO
I am standing in the passage way
where arrivals for medical attention
go through the ER door
amidst bandages & oxygen
I am poised in a medical office
seen with mop & bucket
on 10,000 square feet of Dacron
on the surface of #5 WTC
at the base of The Twin Towers
My Painting didn’t get saved
Should It be dug up?
Would the Orange Town Dump
open Itself up to finding
the excavated reds & blues?
To finding the 3 foot-high letters
My Signature in Black
buried?
February 1st 2012 Barrington Passage, Nova Scotia 5:15pm
________________________________________________________________________
THE SHROUD
Dear Sir:
This email is coming to you
from an artist in Nova Scotia
who grew up in Rockland County
I graduated from Nyack High School in 1979
and obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree
from The Cooper Union in 1983
In 1984 I designed and painted
a 10,000 square foot canvas
on the roof of #5 World Trade Center
(at the base of the Twin Towers)
This art project is called Self Organizing Galaxy
and can be viewed under that name
on Youtube
After the creation and exhibit of Self Organizing Galaxy
the canvas (made of Dacron)
was removed from the roof in two pieces
weighing 250lbs. each
stored by The Port Authority of NY&NJ
until I claimed it and
moved out of Valley Cottage in November of 1986
The man I was soon to marry
insisted the two folded-up pieces be thrown away
at the Orangetown Dump.
Could you send me any information
to find out what is entailed in excavating,
if possible,
such large and historic pieces
of art together measuring 100 feet X 100 feet?
Perhaps The Shroud for The World Trade Center?
Hi there,
With all due respect, in reading this message
I had to wonder if it was a joke…
there has been an enormous amount of development around here
since the 1980s.
The Clarkstown Landfill on Rte 303 has been capped
and closed.
The “dumps” in the swamp in W Nyack
are covered by the second largest mall
in the United States.
Unfortunately the prospect of finding your artwork
in my opinion
is precisely
zero.
Sorry,
February 2nd 2012 The Hawk
________________________________________________
BURIAL
– checked out your YouTube –
nice painting!
Sorry it is buried
somewhere around here.
Did you know they found dinosaur bones
not far from the dump?
And that there was a famous esoteric guy
in the early 20th century
who had elephants in Nyack
and apparently a couple of them are buried
around here somewhere as well?
So there is a lot of interesting stuff underground
and your painting is in good company
somewhere around here…
February 4th 2012 The Hawk
________________________________________________________________
MY THEATRE
It was the largest sewing job ever
for North Sails East in Connecticut
It was laid out, all ten thousand square feet
on top of the most visible rooftop
in the whole world
It was My Dacron canvas
I paid for out of My Artist’s Fee
from The Port Authority of NY&NJ
It was laid out for Me to paint
in view of My Enormous Audience
of office workers
in Lower Manhattan
are any of Them left?
Are there any Men left
of the crew of workers
Who helped Me set it up?
Who helped Me lay out the plastic undercoating
to protect that roof:
#5 World Trade Center?
Who helped Me lay out the canvas
and strap it to the window washer’s track?
Are any of Them left
Who can say, “Hey – I worked
on that –”
or
Who can say, “I saw that painting
from My Desk
on the 65th floor”
or
“the 90th floor”
or
“from Windows on The World?”
February 4th 2012 The Hawk
His words came trickling toward her through the thicket of sound that separated her from the world. His face was anxious that was clear. She had no idea why. He seemed to be very determined that she do something. She didn’t know what. She wasn’t even sure that she cared.
Actually, as she looked at him with focused effort, all that she was sure of was that she didn’t know who he was at all. The sounds that hummed and swam became brambles that swallowed her. She gave herself up to them.
….
In this place it is not really dark nor is it light. It is an always-twilight. Definitely not dawn. The topography is shapeless, colorless, flat. It isn’t foggy or smokey, nor like the moonscapes we all imagine. For this lone traveller (because you never meet another being in this place – each traveler is in their own world entirely) it is as if she has been placed inside a colorless map, one that is shut inside the glove box of the car. There is nothing to see and even if there was, with no vantage point, there is no perspective.
The ground is a different matter altogether. It is full of holes, like the child’s toy where you have to put the right shaped block into the right shaped hole. These are islands surrounded by rushing creeks that come up out of the ground and then as abruptly disappear. There are tiny footpaths along which you step with great care and even these are sometimes smothered by rolling dunes of sand.
It is here that you can get Lost. Lost isn’t falling into the shapes, or being carried away by the creek. Lost is when the path vanishes altogether and there is no way back for forward, and the light never changes and there are no landmarks by which to even guess your way home.
And all around you, like a vibration that comes and goes as if someone is irregularly striking a gong, are waves of sound. Sometimes, and more and more often the longer you stay there, the gong-ringer forgets to strike and there are passages of absolute silence. Not a clean, clear, ringing silence, but one that is stuffed with cotton wool so that not a single breath of air leaks through and reaches your plugged ears.
Slowly through the cotton wool, the bramble of sound returns. You can’t push it away. You have to wait for it to lift and when it does? You are back in the regular world again. Sometimes even there the topography is foreign, the shapes lack familiarity and the creeks rise with no warning.
….
The days that she made the little treks through the world as we know it, became fewer, shorter and more and more difficult. The thicket grew thicker, and brambles of sound more and more invasive, until one day she just didn’t come back out.
Her son tried to find her, he really did. So did the doctors, the kind ladies volunteering at the rest home and her grandchildren. But she was lost to them all, to the world and to herself.
by Kate Hawks
By Kate Hawkes
Sept. 11, 2011
The diagnosis arrived like a feather
Floated down upon us all
Touched us lightly on the way past our
Stunned minds.
This is not a random metaphor – my father was a bird-man.
He loved them all – little as finches, big as geese.
Birds native to his Australian landscape,
From afar as Africa and Europe
He’d come in from the aviaries,
Feathers perched on his black wavy hair,
Eyes alert,
Singing out the adventures of that day.
After the words stopped vibrating
After we all agreed the meds
Didn’t help
The diagnosis became a boulder.
It wrapped itself around our ankles like a ball and chain,
Sat up on our shoulders until, Atlas like, we couldn’t even shrug.
It pressed on our chests like gravestones.
The diagnosis labeled us all.
The hardest part of the journey,
Most demanding,
Consistently dreadful,
(Full of dread)
Was not the food that couldn’t be swallowed,
The bathroom that promised humiliation and pain
The bed that became a prison even as it was
The only haven.
The hardest part of all was the
simple
act of
letting go.
I felt the ghosts of fear and grief and desire
That came and perched like ravens around his bed
On the days that I sat there as he breathed
Slow and hard or fast and shallow.
One day he asked why the door was open
- it wasn’t.
One day he asked who had left the hall light on
-we didn’t have one.
I saw that his soul was getting ready to let him leave.
My heart broke for his leaving me
But I knew
He had worked so hard.
Worked so long and deep
This last 4 weeks
On things he didn’t even know
Were there to work.
The boulder slowly lifted from his heart
He started to fly, further and further away from us.
For longer and longer flights.
He’d return to visit, perched briefly, full of pain, in this world.
One time he didn’t come back.
And the boulder that rested up on those of us still here,
Pressed in harder, more dreadfully, one more time.
Then it slowly began to weather away.
Right after he was gone I tried to go to the aviaries.
But the birds called his name,
Looked at me as brightly as he did,
Feathers drifted slowly with nowhere to land.
I fled.
Today, 3 years on,
The boulder is just occasional gravel in my shoes,
A small stone that presses on my shoulder.
It is also, oddly, in the collection of heart-stones I gather still.
My father gave me one last gift.
He showed me, through his fear and his struggle
That we have to live as completely
As everything gives us opportunity to do.
It may be the boulder that catches your toe
Or bows your back.
It may be birds that call and sprinkle you with feathers.
You have to do it all.
Before the soul can leave
You will do the work you need to do.
You do it ultimately alone.
Then you can fly.
Out of The Remains
of My Mother’s Attic
Out of The Remains
of My Last Half-a-Century
I have salvaged
The Fullness of My Feminine Form
My Ballerina Doll
bought for Me by My Grandmother
after I begged & begged
for a tubby mechanical blond
I watched over & over
in a television Christmas ad
twirling madly in a Little Girl’s Fantasy
My Grandmother from Alabama took Me
into New York City
to pick any doll I wanted
when there stood only one Ballerina
on the shelves & shelves –
I took Her –
staring distant and blue eyed
with red haired curls elaborately styled
She was the most beautiful Doll
I had ever Touched
She was My Ornament Extraordinaire
never to be played with
never to be named
She is still dressed like a Degas Ballerina
with Black Ribbon Around Her Neck
sparkles on Her Tutu
She stands stiff and tall
on My Painted Doll Dresser
Not To Be Played With
still nameless
She Is My Real Doll
Joanna Hyde
November 19th 2011 The Hawk
I look over
it’s that time again
3:30 in the a.m. of course.
I’m getting quite comfortable
with this,
especially in mid June,
at three thirty.
It is only one more hour until -
four thirty.
Four thirty is the time of magic
in June.
It’s the time to arise,
to end the torment,
the tossing and turning
it can end at four thirty
because at four thirty
natures alarm rings.
It rings in it‘s glory,
with all the notes of the octave
but only in June – at four thirty.
The Now
Permission is given.
Like a child on Christmas morning,
I rush out of bed
to greet my gift.
This gift I can see
but I don’t know what’s inside.
Where was it left?
In the usual spot.
It’s a shared gift.
One that isn’t always charged
by no-ones fault
or neglect
it just happens some times.
But
This morning
The red light shines like an old star,
a star that will burn for an eternity
or a few more billion years.
The charge is good…
I Write. J McSween, June2008
That “O” Dress
Black Robe
styled from the 50′s
told Me I was powerful –
one of the most powerful women
on the planet –
if not THE most powerful –
My Anger, My Fury,
was justified –
In That Dress
I was The Black Jesus
ready to allow My Self
entrance
into a Mental Hospital
for The Sake of My Person (et al)
Beliefs
I drank from a very large beaker
sweet Red Wine
called XOXOX
I crossed My Legs
and beat My Right Silver Slipper
into the evening air
I wore gobs & gobs of silver
jewelry
– all that I owned –
but had the worth of one real estate transaction
under my belt
BOY WAS I MAD –
I shot off the centre
of My Tomato-coloured couch
& stomped around The House
heckling
cackling
&
swearing up
&
down
I demanded to be taken out to dinner
and My 2nd Husband drove Me
to McDonald’s
in That Get-up
so He got appointed Body Guard
to an exceedingly valuable woman
but went to bed
leaving Me to call 911
* * *
Joanna Hyde
November 6th 2011 The Hawk
it occurs to me that any major social change or
“acceptance” can come about seemingly only
through the application of music, poetry, or other art forms — as if to
say, the only way anything “changes” is if the pop mainstream goes along
with it, as a REACTION OF SEDUCTION, both artistically and commercially
Joanna Hyde
